MORNING CALM TALES 'Ppi-ppi': Korea's brief pager fad in the '90s
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Workable Words
Casey Lartigue Jr. is co-founder of Freedom Speakers International, a Seoul Honorary Citizen, and co-author of Greenlight to Freedom.
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Korea: deConstructed
How NewJeans stole London's underground
I must confess, I probably couldn’t name all the members of NewJeans. And if the members were scattered amongst a sea of contemporary female K-pop idols, I probably wouldn’t be able to pick them out of a lineup. But that doesn’t really matter for me. I’ve long explored K-pop for the music. I observe the trends. Study the songwriters and producers. Delve into how everything actually gets made. I like putting respect on Kenzie and teaching my students that the K in K-pop might just as well stand for her name rather than Korea. I love uncovering Teddy Park and G-Dragon’s role in shaping the most influential generation on K-pop. How rather than being an underdog, Bang Si-hyuk actually earned his spurs as "Hitman Bang" working with JYP on the Wonder Girls and helping them become the first K-pop group on Billboard. When I listen to K-pop to understand what’s happening, I will often search for playlists and mixes rather than the catalogue of one artist. House is generally my go-to and, for that reason, recent K-pop has been pretty good to me as many of the current acts are leaning
2d ago
Korea: deConstructed
Who gets to be called 'us' in modern Korea?
I recently had to serve as the MC for an important event, placed on stage in front of a large crowd of important Korean people. As we began, everyone was asked to stand, face the Korean flag, and sing the national anthem. With hundreds of eyes on me, I was faced with a question: Do I put my hand on my heart like every other Korean in the room? Or does my foreignness exclude me from that? I had but seconds to decide. It wasn't really about etiquette. It was about whether I was expected to perform belonging or acknowledge exclusion. Korean people will often jokingly remark that I’m more Korean than them. It happens so often that I’m sure anyone with a reasonable grasp of Korean will have experienced it, too. It happens when I’m wearing my Korean football top, drinking sanghwacha, lecturing on Korean history and culture, and so on. They say it in jest but also with feeling and respect. And it’s okay because we both know that what they say is not really true. It’s like when a tourist stumbles through ordering a coffee and the owners smile and compliment them on speaking Korean s
Jul 19, 2026
Korea: deConstructed
The subversive optimism of 'Castaway on the Moon'
Contemporary Korean cinema and dramas have become synonymous with a certain brand of high-octane bleakness. Color-graded trauma porn, 4K nightmares about gapjil, psychological torture, zombies, rape and an omnipresent sense of societal rot. Then, there is Lee Hae-jun’s "Castaway on the Moon (2009)." To watch it is to experience friction against modernity. You will be immediately struck by the wonderful blues and greens. The color and cinematography by Kim Byung-seo is fantastic. As is Jung Jae-young’s face, which gives you fear, disbelief, happiness and boredom all perfectly. But most importantly, I love that it is a film that refuses to treat mental illness as a commodified set-piece. It doesn’t want to you suffer. It wants you to heal. It dares to approach the fragility of the human condition with color, jazz, humor and, perhaps most radically, a genuine empathy that warms the heart without ever becoming marshmallow-sticky. It is a masterpiece of gentle subversion — the religious metaphors and social criticism stand alongside the numerous poop jokes. It tells you that boredom
Jul 13, 2026
Morning Calm Tales
MORNING CALM TALES 'Ppi-ppi': Korea's brief pager fad in the '90s
Before phones lived in our pockets — before they glowed, chirped, hummed, vibrated, tracked us and reminded us of things we hadn’t yet forgotten — there was the pager. In Korea, it was commonly and affectionately called "ppi-ppi." That palm-sized device fit neatly into a brief moment in the technological scheme of things, nudging how we communicated — if only slightly — into the future. In Korea, ppi-ppi weren’t just devices. They let us be connected before we really understood what being connected would come to mean. Almost overnight, pager shops sprang up all over the city. There were at least a dozen in Sinchon alone, along the main drag leading down from Yonsei University — identical, brightly lit and impossible to miss, glowing late into the night. Young clerks stood just inside the doors, eager and alert, ready to usher you into the latest craze. Inside, glass display cases gleamed with rows of nearly identical ppi-ppi, arranged neatly in place, waiting like small, obedient creatures — each one promising that someone, somewhere, might soon be reaching out. Walking p
Jul 11, 2026
Korea: deConstructed
The Korean dystopia is a Western coping mechanism
Journalists love to get Korea wrong. Some are paid to share explosive takes that feed into the subsconscoius orientalist views of the wider world; others just do it for the social media clout. And you only realize how wrong they are when you get off the internet and spend an afternoon in Sokcho, Daegu, or Chuncheon. For anyone that does this, something becomes immediately apparent. Korea isn’t actually that bad. (Or great). The people get along. The kids go to school. The young people date. And everyone drinks ice americano. There is a weird sensation that comes from watching someone deliver a sociological autopsy of a nation in a 14-minute YouTube video essay. Perhaps it’s just the new era where the average internet user is operating under the delusion that a Netflix subscription is functionally equivalent to a PhD. However it arises, the narrative they’ve constructed is a sort of paint-by-numbers cyberpunk dystopia. The chaebol function as overlords, capitalism has been cranked up to some terminal level of suffering, and joy is lowkey against the law. Every Korean male is a to
Jul 4, 2026
Parchment Made of Sheepskins
Who to blame for Korea's World Cup failure
After Korea’s early exit from the football World Cup, I find myself among the ranks of those disappointed by the team’s performance, though certainly not the most disappointed. I had hopes that Korea would do fairly well this time, hopes that have been emphatically dashed. Certainly, Korea did much worse than it should have, especially given that the expanded number of teams meant more routes for getting through to the next round. And while a loss to Mexico on its home turf is fair enough, much less forgivable is the failure at least to hold South Africa to a draw. I have no intention to anatomize the mistakes and failures which led to this disappointment. Plenty have enthusiastically taken up that task. Most of the blame has landed at the feet of former head coach Hong Myung-bo, who for the second time in his career has failed to guide the team out of the group stage. The charges leveled against him seem fair: He showed inferior leadership, insufficient creativity and made poor tactical decisions. But it is more than that: The very process by which he was appointed has become the s
Jul 4, 2026
About the Past
1 Life at American gold mines in northern Korea : Independence Day a century ago
On May 31, 1926, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge called upon the American people to “renew their fidelity to the fundamental principles of the Declaration of Independence,” and suggested that the period between June 28 and July 5 be known as “American Independence Week.” Patriotic celebrations were to be held throughout the U.S., including the ringing of bells at 11 a.m. on June 28, when millions of children would recite the official Patriot’s Pledge of Faith. The American community in Korea was no exception. The Oriental Consolidated Mining Company (OCMC), an American gold mining concession in northern Korea, faithfully celebrated the Fourth of July every year. The company was known for its patriotism, and even its non-American employees looked forward to the Fourth of July — even if their reasons were more about not having to work. According to Kenneth Moyer, then 23, every day at the mine seemed the same, even Sundays, except the Fourth of July. “That is the only day the mine and mills shut down out here,” he explained in a letter home to his mother. He went on to add
Jul 4, 2026
Korea: deConstructed
Latte Stage Capitalism
To talk about the café economy in Seoul is to talk about an architecture of disappointment. A noisy and rumbunctious ever-moving organism of tents, ajumma, toasts, street hawkers, and fake goods has been usurped by air-conditioned coffee shops, all playing the same music, offering the same drinks, and providing the same service. (Admittedly, however, only one of them has recently been forced to issue a groveling apology for not knowing anything about Korean history or, perhaps, knowing too much about Korean history). Latte is horse Korean people are often traditionally associated with tea. My friend Brother Anthony has written books on the subject and proudly offers anyone who visits his office to drink from a wonderfully small cup as he creates concoctions of herbal goodness. And we’re not talking the British kind of “white with two sugars please, darling.” Korean tea is a rainbow of flavors. The southern regions of Boseong and Jeju produce the famous green tea. Yuja tea is made with citron and honey and always given to those with a cold. Boricha (barley tea) is a daily herbal r
Jun 27, 2026
Morning Calm Tales
MORNING CALM TALES The day I crashed a Korean War commemorative event
Seoul was already sweltering by midmorning on June 25, 2000. Heat rose in wavering sheets above the broad plaza outside the War Memorial of Korea as buses pulled up one after another, unloading elderly veterans of the Korean War (1950-53) alongside family members and foreign dignitaries arriving for the ceremony. Inside the memorial grounds, ushers guided guests toward rows of reserved seats while security personnel moved briskly through the growing crowd. Everywhere there were flags, cameras, police, military officers and the low murmur of Korean, English and a dozen other languages blending together in the heavy summer air. I was not supposed to be there. A month earlier, I had interviewed Gen. Paik Sun-yup for an article accompanying my review of his autobiography, "From Pusan to Panmunjom." After the interview, I met several members of the 50th anniversary committee organizing the Korean War commemorative ceremony at the War Memorial in Seoul. President Kim Dae-jung was scheduled to speak, along with military dignitaries, diplomats and veterans from around the world. And somehow, the
Jun 25, 2026
Korea: deConstructed
Can plastic surgery hide national history?
I’ve spent over two decades living here and seen just how good Korea is at the glow-up. It’s a nation that loves looksmaxxing. Things get shiny. Polished. Airbrushed and tucked. From celebrities’ faces to citizens’ ID cards, everything gets cleaned. Including the history. The industries of memory have been working on the national identity with the same clinical precision as is applied to noses and eyelids. Korea remembers itself primarily as a victim while forgetting the moments when it exercised power over others. On June 23, 1965, South Korea struck an agreement with Washington to send its troops into Vietnam. They contributed approximately 325,000 troops to the Vietnam War, the second largest foreign military contributor in the conflict. In doing so, they earned an estimated $5 billion dollars. The Miracle on the Han River, the hardworking Koreans in the textile factors, fields, and foreign lands is true. But it would not have likely happened without war. A war that created the country. A war that divided the country. A war that funded the country. All of them demarcated as
Jun 20, 2026